Music View; PAUL MCCARTNEY'S LATEST IS EXQUISITE BUT FLAWED

By Robert Palmer

Published: April 25, 1982

Paul McCartney was ''the cute Beatle.'' He was also the Beatle who wrote ''Yesterday'' and ''Eleanor Rigby,'' ballads that transcended the popularity of this most popular of all rock groups and became standards, recorded by artists of every stylistic persuasion. And although it's been well over 10 years since the breakup of the Beatles, Mr. McCartney's image hasn't changed much - to the public at large, he's still the cute, consummate pop tunesmith.

He is also the surviving member of the Lennon-McCartney songwriting partnership that made the Beatles what they were, and as such he has been subjected to intense media scrutiny since John Lennon's death almost a year and a half ago. When he began working on a new album a few months after Mr. Lennon was shot, and working on it with George Martin, who produced the Beatles from the beginning, rumors began to fly. Teams of reporters scoured the Caribbean island of Montserrat, where Mr. Martin owns a studio. When Ringo Starr showed up to play drums on a song or two, rumors of a reunion of the surviving Beatles flared once again. There were even reports that Yoko Ono, Mr. Lennon's widow, was about to participate in the sessions. She didn't; neither did the Beatles' lead guitarist, George Harrison.

Now Mr. McCartney's album is here, and so, briefly, was Mr. McCartney. Last weekend, sequestered in the office of the CBS Records president Walter Yetnikoff and provided with tight security, he talked about the record, ''Tug of War'' (Columbia), and about some of the things that interest and worry the most commercially successful ex-Beatle. He was dressed in a V-neck sweater, checkered shirt, and jeans, and although he is in the vicinity of 40, he has retained his ''cute Beatle'' looks. He has also retained the acute self-awareness that seems to have come with being a member of the world's most famous pop group.

''Tug of War,'' Mr. McCartney's exquisitely crafted though lyrically flawed new album, is his most ambitious piece of work in a number of years. Even the title sounds substantial. ''The theme we were messing with was conflict,'' he noted, ''and it also has something to do with the idea of opposites. I don't think I would have used that theme before; I would have been afraid of bringing people down. But I've been growing up, and after all, it isn't news that there's a tough side to life.''

The album sounds like a surefire hit, and a windfall for Columbia Records, which has several million dollars invested in Mr. McCartney and failed to turn his two earlier albums for the label into spectacularly huge sellers. The albums were not critical successes either. Since the early 1970's, Mr. McCartney has worked mostly within the confines of Wings, the rock group he started with his wife, Linda. He has made some delightful pop singles, and his second Columbia album, ''McCartney II,'' was a one-man-band studio project that had plenty of inventive moments.

But critics and fans alike have been waiting for a really firstrate album from Mr. McCartney for some time. Since the breakup of the Beatles, he has tended to exaggerate the light, frothy side of his music. His work retained virtually none of the emotional toughness that informed many of the early Beatles songs he co-wrote with John Lennon, and many listeners concluded that that emotional toughness was Mr. Lennon's contribution. Mr. McCartney himself has bolstered his image as a clever but essentially lightweight pop craftsman by announcing in one of his biggest hits that he simply wants to ''fill the world with silly love songs'' and asking ''what's wrong with that, I'd like to know?''

What was wrong was that Mr. McCartney lacked a strong collaborator like Mr. Lennon, someone who would leaven his sugarcoated esthetic with a bit of grit and irony. On ''Tug of War'' he had several strong collaborators, most notably the producer George Martin and Stevie Wonder, who performs on two memorable tracks and co-wrote one with Mr. McCartney. The Wings' guitarist Denny Laine and vocalist Linda McCartney appear on most of the songs, but ''Tug of War'' is a Paul McCartney album, and in fact its release signals the breakup, at least for the foreseeable future, of Wings as a group.

When I commented to Mr. McCartney that the challenge of working with George Martin and Stevie Wonder seems to have been good for him, he nodded vigorously. ''I don't want to take away from Wings, but it's true, I needed that,'' he said. ''I had been feeling there was something missing, and making this album, I found out what it was. When George and I were working on the orchestral arrangement for the song 'Tug of War,' for example, we recorded the orchestra and it sounded pretty good. But we had some bass parts we hadn't recorded quite right, and George said,'Look, this is my reputation and yours going right on the line, would you mind if we brought the orchestra back and recorded it again?' So we did it, at huge cost to somebody, probably us in the end, but it was worth it.''